1. Technical Field
The invention relates to communications networks. More particularly, the invention relates to a technique for extending relevance-based computation to include computation based on information accessed from or exchanged with a variety of agents. Techniques also include particular architectural models for distributed decision making.
2. Description of the Background Art
As information and computing technology continues to evolve and continues to become more and pervasive among the general and global population, including enterprises, for example, managing and deploying such technology in any computing environment is challenging.
For example, an enterprise may use a wide variety of different machines for an equally wide variety of purposes. Some machines may be performing the same job, i.e. the enterprise may have multiple machines for scaling purposes, and others of the machines are doing different jobs. However, collectively, they're all doing something important for the enterprise.
As another example, individual computers may need to make decisions about what they need to do, but they now depend on what other computers adjacent to them are doing. For instance, the IT administrator doesn't reboot the middle-tier (the application server) of a three-tier web-application, when end users are still using the application server through the web servers. Typically, the IT administrator waits to make sure the web servers are reconfigured to indicate that the application is unavailable or otherwise redirecting traffic to another application server.
It would be desirable to empower each computing entity to make a decision based on context about some other entity.
It would further be desirable to extend empowerment to each computing element via agents and to extend relevance-based computation to include computation based on information accessed from or exchanged with a variety of agents. It would further be desirable to provide particular architectural models for distributed decision making.